Site Assessment · £449
Scan a site before you sign.
An 11-page editorial brief on the site: verdict, routes, comparables, officer intelligence, risks, process, finance carry. Standard turnaround two working days from brief confirmation. Built on every comparable small-site decision the borough has made.
Want to see the depth first? Buy a £125 sample. Credited against the £449 if commissioned within 30 days.
Pre-application advice tells you one officer’s opinion, six to eight weeks after you’ve exchanged. A Site Assessment tells you what the borough’s last three hundred comparable decisions actually did, in days rather than weeks, before you commit.
Nine sections, one deliverable
The v4 Site Assessment is structured as an editorial brief, not a data dump. Eleven pages, landscape A4. The verdict lands on page two; the evidence and methodology sit in the appendix for anyone who needs to audit it.
At a glance
Headline verdict on page two: Go, Caution, or Stop, with the risk rating and the three numbers that drive it. Designed to brief a partner or board paper in sixty seconds.
Routes
Capacity model with P20, P50 and P75 unit-count ranges, alongside the committee-versus-delegated probability for a scheme of this scale in this borough.
Comparables
Five to seven real applications for similar sites in your borough. Addresses, outcomes, unit counts, determination times, and the reasons behind each result.
Officer intelligence
Where coverage allows, the likely case officer’s caseload, approval pattern, and the refusal-reason language they have used in comparable cases.
Risks & design brief
The specific reasons schemes like yours get refused in this borough, alongside the design parameters — massing, frontage, materials — that the council has been approving.
Process Gantt
Illustrated determination timeline for your scheme type in this borough: validation to delegated decision, or validation through committee, with realistic week markers.
Finance carry
Quantified holding cost from validation through determination at current rates, including CIL, S106 and the affordable-housing threshold inflection if relevant.
Glossary
Plain-language definitions for every technical term in the assessment, so the brief reads cleanly to a partner, a lender, or anyone outside the planning specialism.
Methodology appendix
The dataset, evidence tiers, sample sizes and limits behind every claim in the assessment. Auditable to the original decision notices on the council’s own portal.
How it works
Tell us about the site
Address, borough, scheme type, target unit count. Two minutes on the form below.
We run the analysis
Your site is scored against every comparable decision in that borough. Verdict drafted, capacity modelled, comparables selected, officer pattern checked, finance carry calculated.
Brief lands in your inbox
11-page landscape A4 PDF plus HTML, typically within two working days of brief confirmation. Concise enough for a board paper, detailed enough to brief your architect.
Versus the alternatives
You already have ways to read a site’s planning risk. Here’s why developers use a Site Assessment alongside or instead.
Site Assessment
Statistical picture from every comparable decision the borough has made. Priced to be pre-acquisition, not post.
Pre-application advice
One officer, one scheme, one opinion. Sought after acquisition because the fees and timeline don’t fit earlier.
Planning consultant
One consultant’s judgement. Useful for strategy and drafting; not priced or paced for acquisition decisions.
Your own research
Council planning portals are not designed for developers. Decision Notices are scattered, unstructured, and unclassified.
Does it work?
Three numbers you can act on. Tested on 4,646 live London decisions the model did not see in advance.
Bid with confidence. Sites flagged Low Risk are approved. London average is 1 in 2.
Bid the right number. Capacity prediction lands within 2 units of the approved scheme 74% of the time. Six-figure residual, quantified.
Or don’t bid at all. Typical abortive cost of a refused application. One assessment pays for itself the first time it flags a loser.
Pricing
Per site. One-off. No subscription.
A refused application typically costs £20,000 to £35,000 in abortive fees before holding costs. The assessment costs less than your first set of drawings.
Questions
Before you make an offer, or during due diligence before exchange. The assessment is designed to inform your bid, not to replace your planning consultant after you’ve committed.
An 11-page landscape A4 PDF, plus HTML in your inbox. Cover page, then nine sections: at-a-glance verdict, routes, comparables, officer intelligence, risks & design brief, process Gantt, finance carry, glossary, methodology appendix. Designed to be read on a laptop, printed for a meeting, or scanned on a phone.
No. This is a data-driven intelligence brief. It tells you what comparable schemes achieved, what the refusal risks are, who the likely case officer is, and what the numbers look like. It complements, not replaces, professional planning advice.
Site address, borough, scheme type (conversion, demolish and rebuild, and so on), approximate site area, and target unit count. If you know PTAL and conservation status, include those too.
Right answer for the application stage. The Site Assessment is upstream of that. It sits between offer and exchange, where a consultant won’t usually engage unless you’ve paid for a pre-app or a fee proposal first. One consultant gives you one officer’s read on one scheme. The Assessment gives you what every comparable scheme in that borough has actually achieved (Lambeth conversions: 168 decisions, with space standards and design among the most common refusal reasons). £449 versus £20–35k abortive if the bid was wrong. Different tools, different stages.
All 33 London boroughs. The dataset is complete, not a sample.
Each site is £449. For 3 or more sites in the same borough, get in touch for a package price.
Request a Site Assessment
Tell us about your site. We’ll confirm the brief and send the assessment within two working days of confirmation.